When providing compressed moving images over broadcasting or network services and the like, the upper limit of the frame frequency that may be played back is restricted by the performance of the receiver. Consequently, the service side is required to take the playback performance of prevalent receivers into account, and restrict the service to low frame frequency only, or simultaneously provide multiple high-grade and low-grade services.
Adding support for high frame frequency services increases the cost of the receiver, and becomes a barrier to adoption. If only low-cost receivers dedicated to low frame frequency services are widespread, and in the future the service side starts a high frame frequency service, the new service is completely unwatchable without a new receiver, which becomes a barrier to adoption of the service.
Moving image compression schemes such as H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) (see Non-Patent Literature 1) are generally made up of the following three types of pictures.
I picture: decodable by itself
P picture: decodable by itself with reference to an I picture or another P picture
B picture: decodable by itself with reference to an I picture, a P picture, or another B picture
Utilizing this property, frame-decimated playback is possible to some extent, such as by playing only I pictures and P pictures, for example. However, with this method, finely decimated playback is difficult, and usage as a practical service is challenging.